Video library redesign idea - How can we improve Smart Playlists, aka Filtered Lists?

xexe Wrote:The tale of XBMC Nodes in Xe's house....

Xe has a large movie library and a giant TV library (several times bigger than any of the examples listed here). File mode seldom see the light of day for Xe and never for his family.

Xe manages his library and is obsessed with tidyness.

He uses the current nodes as follows:


Movies
======
Title: The majority of the time.
Genre: Fills the gap when he wants to watch something but doesn't know what it is yet.
Year: On the odd occasion when in the mood for something modern or old (Year node not the best for achieving this i.e He is never looking for something made in 1972 but in last xx years etc)
Actor: Once to satisfy a bet a.k.a never
Director: never
Studio: never

TV shows
======
Title: always
Genre: Never
Year: Never
Actor: Never
Director: Never
Studio: Never

His family use XBMC daily but in a slightly different way (not caring about how the back-end works):

First stop is always Recently added. If nothing jumps out there they browse the library genres like...

Movies
======
Title: Rarely
Genre: Almost always
Year: Never
Actor: Never
Director: never
Studio: Never

TV shows
======
Title: Always
Genre: Never
Year: Never
Actor: Never
Director: Never
Studio: Never

Right enough with the third person writing Xe...

We use Nodes for when we don't know what movies to watch however that is becoming less and less useful. It was fine when the Mrs could go to the Horror movie genre and there were 20 movies there but now there are 500 its less useful.

Filters sound like the perfect solution with one caveat. Starting from the big list and then applying a filter requires that the big list loads fast. After a point the big list gets slow to load even on fast hardware. For example my Tv show list takes 60+ seconds to load when initially entering and also most of the time when going from Season level back up to the main level. Yes the collection is huge and that's why it is slow but to stay as useful this needs to be taken into account.

For the younglings browsing by movie rating would be useful as there are suitable movies in quite a few genres and not an immediately family proof way to find them.

Speaking hypothetically "less is more in this household". Trying to explain all the XBMC features is an ongoing chore and anything intuitive that can work with a few remote control buttons wins big.

As an example If we could filter for modern horror movies with a big budget and a decent IMDB rating intuitively that would help alot. Being presented with a list of plot keywords remaining after the filter had been applied if done right would help alot too.

Recently added TV and Movies is a firm favourite here. One major downside of the recently added tv lists is that it often gets saturated out by the replacement of a tv recorded ep with a dvd rip. I often have 25 new individual eps for 25 different shows all lined up to watch then the addition of a new dvd season pushes 22 of them out the list. Thats a pain that would benefit from a solution of "filter the last xx eps from unique shows added"

Hope this helps

Wow! Sounds like Xe lives over at TRJB's house :-)

Only notable difference would be TRJB browsing movies by Actor (actually actress) more frequently. Eg. Just watched "Blood Diamond" and said "hmmm, that Jennifer Connelly's a good actress, and quite a cutie to boot - I wonder what else I have with her in it..." I do this quite frequently. Otherwise, wifey and the kids use the machine is virtually exactly as Xe described...

And yes, our collection too is huge, with all of the same issues the Xe described with respect to loading time, and replacing old TV recordings with newer DVD's or DVDRips, etc., or moving masses of files from one location to another having the same effect on the database and newly added files, etc.

Cheers
The REAL Joe

One additional thing I'd like with the new library (if it gets redeveloped) is some rudimentary filtering capability based on SOURCES. IE, in the 'add a source' screen, I've created one called "HD Movies", and I added local drive and smb paths to point to a half-dozen or so folders where I store those on my various machines; likewise, I added another source called SD Movies where all of my DivX/XviD DVD rips are organized by adding their collective paths to that source. I have another one where dummy .avi files are stored to catalog offline media in a source called "Offline". Etc (this could also go on for DVD ISO movies; HDTV TV Caps; SD TV shows, on and on).

Now XBMC has no problem scanning all of the movie content to the movie library; and likewise all of the TV content. But there's no apparent simple way to filter it, it's *all* displayed in the movie or TV library at once, and there are times when I only want to watch HD, other times when I'm bored and want to browse what I have in SD, etc.

It would be nice if I could go into the Filters and pick "By Source" and have a list of my various user-named sources show up (similar to the way Genres; Date; etc work), so now I'd only be looking at my HD movies, or my SD TV shows, or my DVD ISOS, etc.

I think this could add a tremendous amount of flexibility to those with large collections. Anyone else think this would be a good idea?

Cheers,
The REAL Joe

yup. ^ part of the plan if we ever get rolling.

Hello, I'm new in HTPC world and new with XBMC.

I have been testing some mediacenter software and xbmc is the best of all them, but logically it is not perfect and i miss specially a feature.

What I miss is the option to add new video sections to the main menu, for example, I love documentaries, and I would like to have my own section with just documentaries, where i can see them like movies, that is, fantart, thumbnails and even info throw a nfo file...., i know there is not a documentary database yet..., but some of us would like that option, adding our information manually.

There would be other ppl that would prefer for example some sport games videos, maybe musical videos, or even xxx .

I have been exploring a bit inside aeon, but i dont know if it is possible to hack it to add this feature that i'm comment about, probably it is not since it is not fully supported by xbmc (or am i wrong?)

Since i'm foreign, sorry about my english.

Thanks for your time and your work.

You should be able to do this with smart playlists if your have scanned in all of your content.

There are such plans, but in the meantime I suggest you look here:
http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=61779

My cognitively challenged brother, has 907 Movies & TV episodes so far. For the movies I would prefer the ability to define a hierarchy of genres (Horror includes generic horror + Godzilla + Frankenstein). I'll probably achieve this by using File mode and using the directories as genres, and sub-genres. For TV shows I'll just list by title (unless he gets a bunch of them).

I was searching on why my actors names did not download when earlier they were. Currently I am still playing with XBMC as only found it yesterday, so been trial and error so far.

Personally this is my feed back

In order of how I use my htpc

1) Title
2) Genre (a very close second I must add)
3) Actor (but too many actors names are download, e.g bit part when I want arnie, or stallone)
4) Year of release (Sometimes)
5) Director (Would be interesting in a search field to see what else they have done)
5) Studio (LOL Nope)

I would love to see Genres or indeed Actors where you could have a decent picture of that rather than a bland folder.

I think having graphical items for these make them a lot sexier to look at, with a search function.

I have been using Team Media Portal for a few weeks, but already I am hooked on XBMC and shall be changing how I view my media now.

I know it is not related, but a touch screen version would be excellent, and a skin that represents a pub jukebox video style is the business.

Skins are as important I think as the program without a sexy looking skin, you can have the best program in the World, and you look and just walk by, thankfully XMBC have both.

Thank you to giving up your time and passion and making this program as fantastic as it is.

jmarshall Wrote:Hi all,
2. Could this be done better in an alternate way (eg by enabling a "filter" on one or more genres)?

I discovered smartplaylists only recently, as I never wanted a playlist of movies but rather a filter that would allow me to sort by other criteria then default ones (genre, year, actor...) so frankly - never tried it with movies

In my use case, I need to

1. filter/separate content for adults a kids (using profiles)
2. categorize adult content to documentaries, HD, home videos and movies
3. categorize kids content to educational, movies for older, movies younger one

I found that smartplaylists have powerfull metadata filtering capabilities, so this can be done without problem. As metadata criteria wasn't always sufficient, I made separate folders for content (/documentaries, /home_vids) and filtered content using smartplaylist PATH query.

Only downside in my opinion is that you have to navigate to playlists in order to use it, which is not so intuitive for the rest of the family.

It would be helpful if you could have a choice of saving results as either smartplaylist or 'smartfilter' (along with existing genres, year... filters).

Before using smartplaylists I had to use files and library view in order to separate content, but rest of the family never got used to it.

That's the plan, yeah. Essentially we want to allow the node structure in the db to allow you to slot in smartfilters wherever is applicable.

Ofcourse, if you're dividing stuff up based on path, that'll be doable without smartplaylists should you want them to be a separate "mini-library".